A Classic Revival

A house with a stylish history gets an update

A few years ago, John Dransfield and Geoffrey Ross found the home they had been searching for—a grand Georgian Revival estate named Cherryfields—a short distance from where they were living in New Jersey's Somerset County. The only problem was that the house was already occupied. "We were obsessed," Dransfield says. "We'd drive by in the morning to see if anybody was up, and drive by at night to see if the lights were on." The owner, a recent widow in her 80s, had lived in the house for nearly half a century and wanted to move to a smaller home. "You must meet her," a friend told them. "She's just outrageous." A 9 A.M. appointment was made. "She walked out in full regalia," Dransfield recalls, "wearing a fabulous suit, a jeweled bib necklace, a big hat. She extended her hand and said, 'Hi! I'm Nancy Pyne . . . but you can call me Princess.'"

They made a deal on the spot, but before they could complete the transaction Princess had to find a new home. She searched for months, leaving Ross and Dransfield on pins and needles. "Finally," Dransfield says, "she asked us, 'What kind of house do you have?'" Princess toured their 1806 farmhouse and fell in love. In the end, they simply swapped homes. "She has become our Auntie Mame," Ross says. "She still has full rein of Cherryfields. She comes over when we're out and leaves little notes that say things like, 'Love the new chair in the library.' She gives us unauthorized tours of other people's property. She always says the best time to visit someone is when they're not at home."

Styled by: Carlos Mota; Photographer: Simon Upton

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Cherryfields is in what Dransfield describes as New Jersey's horse country. (Princess's sister introduced John F. Kennedy to Jacqueline Bouvier, who rode on the adjacent property; the late Mrs. Onassis's quarter horse still lives next door.) The house was formed in 1929 when two sisters commissioned the architect A. Musgrave Hyde, who designed some of the district's palatial homes, to unite the 1840s caretaker's and chauffeur's cottages of a nearby estate. Hyde connected the structures by adding an ample living room and a curving conservatory. "The building is long and rambling," says Dransfield, "but it's only one room deep, so all the major rooms have light on both north and south sides."

Princess hired her friends Sister Parish and Albert Hadley to decorate the interior of Cherryfields in 1963, but little was done to update their patrician style over the following decades. "We thought, 'It's vintage Parish-Hadley—it's sacred,'" Ross says. "But at eightysomething, Albert is still all about making a house modern and keeping it relevant." The living room's windows and French doors were covered with heavy curtains of quilted linen. "We were going to have them remade," Ross continues, "but when we took them down for the painters to redo the room, Princess walked in and said, 'If you put those back up I'm never coming to this house again!'"

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The spirit of Parish-Hadley remains, however, along with some of their original paint colors, but Dransfield and Ross have made the house their own. The couple moved there after buying and decorating a sequence of homes in New York City and eastern Long Island. The interiors invariably became laboratories for their eponymous design studio, which produces small furnishings and high-end bedding and table linens. "We would change houses as our tastes changed," Ross says. "But this one is a keeper for life. There's enough space here that the rooms can constantly evolve."

The decor is steeped in history; many rooms have artifacts from an earlier age of travel and discovery. In the entryway, lush gouaches once sold as souvenirs of the Grand Tour show Vesuvius in dramatic eruption. Nineteenth-century schoolroom prints of Egyptian monuments hang in the master bedroom. A collection of 400 military maps of Europe originally commissioned by Napoléon III are housed in leather boxes in the library. The couple framed a selection of their favorite locations to decorate the living room. The dining room mantel came from one of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Hartford, Connecticut, homes.

Dransfield and Ross share the place with their cat, Marco, and two harlequin Great Dane puppies, Jasper and India. (Their beloved dog Cooper died a few months ago.) Two snow-white peacocks, Octavius and Phaedra, roam the grounds. Their owners were recently forced to surround a loggia with curtains to prevent the birds from using it as a bathroom. How do the peacocks and the puppies get along? "They're frenemies," Dransfield acknowledges ruefully.

Later this year, a white-bronze Lord & Burnham greenhouse, built in 1910 and formerly owned by the King of Morocco, will be reassembled on the property, where it will accompany a kitchen garden, a woodland glade, and a walled Charleston garden. As they've moved from house to house, these passionate gardeners have missed watching their plantings come to maturity. "You can paint a room and change it overnight, but it takes years to get a garden right. When we plant a tree here, we're looking forward to seeing it 20 years from now."